Posted by You have built an app that looks perfect from all angles, and it is already live in the App Store and Play Store. Now you need to market and promote the app without really spending a fortune through prime-time media ads and front-page publications. You have constraints with the marketing budget.
Don’t worry; social media platforms can better promote the app than traditional media channels. Most importantly, most social promotional tools come as free except for the affordable sponsored posts or social ads.
As more than 57% of the global population is now active on social media platforms, an app’s social marketing strategy is quite irreplaceable from the strategic marketing mix.
But social media platforms are too many and time-consuming. On the other hand, every other marketer has a social media presence making the social space more competitive.
How to beat these challenges and ensure the visibility of the app to your intended audience? How to boost app downloads through social media?
Before you develop an app from scratch to take your business to the next level, look here for some tested and tried tips to help your app receive good traction on social channels.
Target Social Media Platforms Most Suitable for Your App
As per a report from GlobalWebIndex, 54% of users across social channels particularly use these mediums for browsing and researching commercial products and services. Naturally, social media platforms come as organic media channels for app marketing.
But not all user groups are equally active on all social platforms. Every social media platform is dominated by a particular interest group or demographic category of the population. That’s why it is important to know your app audience and the social channels of their preference.
Since the social media ecosystem is vast, comprising too many channels for different user niches, it is impractical to focus on all of them for marketing your app. Instead, focus on a selected few mediums where most of your target audience can be found.
At the same time, it is important to have clear objectives for app marketing on every social channel. You may consider increasing follower base as the goal for Twitter, but on Instagram, you may target mainly influencers to widen your outreach. Define this objective for each social platform.
Let’s now briefly introduce some of the major social platforms in the context of app marketing.
- Facebook: With close to 3 million user base, Facebook has a larger footfall than the population of China. It is a great platform for establishing relationships and boosting loyalty with your user base. But for becoming visible to a large number of new audiences, Facebook is highly competitive and challenging.
- Twitter: Twitter is the best medium to create brand awareness. By using appropriate hashtags, you can engage in relevant and trending conversations and boost visibility.
- Pinterest: This image-focused social media channel is dominated by the female audience and hence is a must-target medium for apps catering to women and girls. Using quality images and graphics is a must for gaining visibility on Pinterest.
- Youtube: With around two and a half billion user base, YouTube is one of the most used search engine platforms now. When it comes to marketing, YouTube is mainly dominated by the “How-to” videos.
- LinkedIn: LinkedIn is the most sought-after platform for business users, professionals, developers, and job seekers. This is why it is a great medium for all types of B2B content, including enterprise apps.
- Instagram: Instagram has emerged as one of the fastest-growing social media platforms with a predominant focus on trending visual content. This is why any trending app having a visual content strategy will find this platform irreplaceable from its marketing mix.
- TikTok: This is the social platform mostly focused on millennials or teenaged audiences. The platform is mostly used by its young audience for publishing funny and interesting short video content. Any app catering to a young audience with fun, shopping, and entertainment will find TikTok immensely helpful.
Create Pre-Launch Buzz
Do you think your app marketing begins just the day you finish building the app, and it is published on the app marketplaces? You are completely wrong.
In a breathlessly competitive app market, every app reaches out to its target audience as soon as the final app concept and design are out and the app is live. We call this pré-launch app marketing.
What pre-launch marketing does for app promotion is invaluable for many reasons. It creates a buzz and generates audience expectations from the app. This buzz creation helps get the first wave of downloads when the app is finally launched.
You can use social media platforms extensively for pre-launch app marketing to generate buzz around the yet-to-be-launched app. Create social media pages, small videos describing the key value proposition of the app and frequently engage with the target audience.
Leverage Sponsored Posts or Paid Ads
Sponsored posts or paid ads that consume far less cost than traditional media ads can quickly drive traction for a new app product. In some social channels such as Facebook and Instagram, paid ads and sponsored posts are highly successful in driving engagement and conversion.
As per the latest statistics, social ads and sponsored posts contribute to 49% of app downloads in both app marketplaces. Since driving organic social media engagement has become too competitive, paid ads and sponsored posts are increasingly being relied upon by app marketers.
Since most social media channels allow users to tap on the install button from the respective app stores, choosing the right channel where your target audience has the highest presence can easily drive traction and downloads.
Make Use of Both Industry Influencers and Micro-Influencers
Influencer marketing continues to remain a backbone for app promotion and audience outreach methods across social media platforms. The influencer marketing from being an optional method grew now to a multi-billion dollar industry within a few years.
As per the Twitter report, influencers’ recommendations directly helped convert sales for nearly 40% of users across all brands and categories.
But influencer marketing is no longer limited to major industry stalwarts, celebrities, and people with millions of followers. These days even small influencers with a limited circle of influence play a great role in helping brands with audience outreach and traction. No wonder, the importance of micro-influencers is growing for app promotion.
User-Generated Content (UGC)
What about turning satisfied app users into brand advocates? Yes, people tend to become more convinced by positive reactions and feedback from actual customers than by so-called promotional stuff. This is why User Generated Content (UGC) appeared as a great social marketing strategy for mobile apps in general.
Social media posts and ads that display user-generated content (USG) receive around 4 times higher click-through rates than regular ads. The best thing about such content is that when a user demonstrates the app’s value in real-life contexts, it becomes more convincing than usual.
Promotional Contests
Everyone has a secret wish to win, and any contest flares up that wish. Seasoned marketers and strategists know this, and hence they launch lucrative contests from time to time. This cannot be different with app marketing on social media platforms.
Any contest offers lucrative incentives to motivate people to try a product. In this case, you need to offer incentives that motivate the potential users to download and try the app.
Make the contest campaign successful, make it funny, simple, and thoroughly engaging with appropriate captions and visual content. Some apps can also create an in-app contest and run the same on social media. This strategy is greatly helpful for gaming apps.
Create Engaging Social Media Pages
Though it is a basic social media marketing strategy embraced and implemented by almost all marketers, it is still effective if you can design the page creatively, publish quality content regularly and engage users in a relevant conversation.
Align the social media page with the look and feel of your app and the brand message. Post relevant content that generates interest in your app regularly. Offer a mix of content including images, memes, industry statistics, infographics, animation, video, GIFs, etc.
Video Ads
More than blogs and text content, the attention-grabbing video content enjoys the highest potential to go viral on social media platforms. It is always advisable to create a trailer video just months before the app is launched for app marketing.
Consecutively, after the launch, continues publishing small video content describing the real-life benefits of the app, user-generated content, and different aspects helpful for your target audience.
Make sure the published video contents are instantly engaging, filled with fun elements, and relevant to the user contexts. Use only professional-quality video output for app marketing on social media. Consider live media streaming as an option for connecting users during an event associated with the app niche.
Conclusion
Are these tips enough to make your app glide through the competitive space of social media? These tips are helpful as long as you don’t adhere to them, like checking boxes in a form. You always need to be creative to tweak and mix new things in your app marketing strategy. After all, social media marketing demands creativity to stand out from the competition.
About the author :Â
Tuhin Bhatt is a Co-Founder of Intelivita, an enterprise web and mobile app development company based in the UK and India. He helps enterprises and startups overcome their digital transformation and mobility challenges with the might of on-demand solutions powered by cutting-edge technologies such as augmented reality, virtual reality, IoT, and native mobile apps.